The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Human-Computer Interaction Empirical Research

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic caused in the human-computer interaction (HCI) research field. Specifically, we aim to investigate how the HCI empirical research methodology changed due to the restrictions caused by COVID-19. For this reason, we analyzed all the papers published in the 2021 edition of The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), which is generally considered the premier international conference for the field of HCI. Through the analysis of CHI papers, we identified four main effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on HCI research: influence on participants; influence on apparatus; influence on experiment procedure; other influences. These effects are described in detail and broken down into additional subcategories. Moreover, papers on pandemic-related topics were also identified. In addition, we performed some comparisons with the previous and successive edition of the conference, and extended some analysis, e.g categorization, to CHI 2022 papers. The analysis found that 23% of CHI 2021 papers and 36% of CHI 2022 papers reported some influences of the pandemic, the most common being a change in the procedures researchers used to interact with participants in their studies, in most cases based on remote communication technologies.